XX instilled a new fear in me of my brain being hijacked/used as a reproduction organ for ideas that then spread to other people and continue to reproduce.

It makes it deeply uncomfortable to recommend that amazing book, because you have a fear that you're doing exactly what it wants you to do so it can propagate.

The book itself is meta enough that it already breaches the wall between story and the real world. So it feels like a more real phenomenon than it otherwise would if it was strictly self-contained.